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When life gets busy, the busy…don’t get bloggin’? Someone suggested I write a post on balancing taking care of a kid, working full-time from home, and keeping up a blog. Which is pretty hilarious because obviously I have no clue. “Don’t even try” is the best advice I have to give.

The backyard is coming along nicely. Slowly, but nicely. Over last weekend, we stained the fence and started building the small patio outside of the living room. We cleared the ground, removed the little concrete slab, and then filled the area with 4-5” of gravel and 2” of sand. Then we spent a day figuring out how to arrange all the paving stones in the correct ‘random’ pattern.

We still have to rent a masonry saw to trim the end pieces, and then brush sand between the stones. And then comes the planting. There’s about a foot-and-a-half of space where I want to…do something? I know nothing about plants and gardening. I want the area to fill up with lots of lush greenery but I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m afraid that whatever I end up planting there is going to be looking pretty tragic in a few months.

Our yard isn’t quite as small as it seems in the picture, but our house is at a weird angle on the lot, so there is only about 8’ of space between the back of the house and the back fence. The rest of the yard is off the side and we still have to plan what we’re doing with that. We will probably just lay down sod for this year and deal with making it fancy next spring. You know, after we come into a million dollar inheritance or something.

February was hard. Too many late nights, too many projects going on, never enough time. Never enough coffee. After this weekend, I think things will settle down and I’ll be able to breathe a little bit. I’m saying that very quietly so I don’t jinx it. Shhh.

This month, I really really need to finish (and, uh, start) turning the spare room into my home office because slouching on the couch with a laptop all day is killing my back. And at the end of the month, we’re both taking a week off of work to turn the weed-filled patch of dirt behind the house into a real live backyard, with a patio and a garden and trees and all that crap. I’m sure there will be no problem with completing that in a week by two people who have no idea what they’re doing and a very limited budget, right? Right. It’s going to be awesome.